A dinner with MotoGP legends led to a revealing conversation – Dani Pedrosa explained to Valentino Rossi his path to becoming a rain specialist
On the occasion of the last Grand Prix of the past season in Valencia, the organizers of the MotoGP World Championship gathered the legends who had just been honored as members of the “Hall of Fame” around a table. A select circle of the most important riders in history.
Dani Pedrosa and Valentino Rossi sat next to each other at the dinner, which was also attended by Giacomo Agostini, Jorge Lorenzo, Casey Stoner, Freddie Spencer and Kevin Schwantz. This led to one of the most interesting conversations captured by the cameras.
In this conversation, the Spaniard explained to the Italian in detail the strategy he used to master riding on a wet track after many setbacks, crashes and injuries. For a long time, this was one of his biggest weaknesses.
In contrast to most of the riders on today’s grid, Pedrosa only trained on the bike when he felt it was necessary, whereas in everyday life he preferred to train in the gym or ride his bike.
However, this routine changed after his crash at the 2008 German Grand Prix, when the Sachsenring was soaked by rain. Despite this, Pedrosa led the race with a commanding lead after the early stages.
The Honda rider had just completed the fifth lap and had already opened up a lead of more than seven seconds over Casey Stoner (Ducati), a specialist for such conditions.
The lead was apparently too big for the Spaniard. He crashed at the end of the straight, crashed into the barrier and injured his arm. In the end, Stoner won the Grand Prix by around four seconds ahead of Rossi (Yamaha).
“That’s when I said to myself: That’s it!” Pedrosa told MotoGP.com. “In the rain, I didn’t really understand where the limit was. I decided that I had to do something to improve, because I thought that I was always losing the championship because of the rain races.”
“So I took the supermoto bike on a rainy day and went to the kart track. I crashed on the first lap. Then I tried to get the tires up to temperature, went out again, and boom – I crashed again.“
”At that moment, I understood that you can’t grasp anything like that because the asphalt on kart tracks is very slippery.” So Pedrosa turned to his sponsor and mentor at the time, Alberto Puig, who himself had ridden in the motorcycle world championship for ten years.
“So Alberto and I started to think about what we could do,” Pedrosa continues. Puig lives in the northern part of Barcelona, but spends a lot of time on a family estate in Cardedeu on the outskirts of the city.
This area is surrounded by hills that can be reached via winding roads. “When Alberto saw that a rainy day was coming up, he would call me and I would go. We’d both put on our leather suits and rain gear.“
”We’d take money with us to fill up the tank in case we ran out of gas, and then we’d set off. Uphill, downhill, one behind the other.” Pedrosa learned to ride in the rain on normal country roads, on public roads.
“From then on, I turned things around and got podium finishes and the odd win in the wet.” He won in the rain for the first time in Sepang 2012. Shortly afterwards, he won in Valencia in wet conditions. Further rain victories followed at Le Mans 2013 and Motegi 2015.
With 31 victories, Pedrosa is the most successful rider in the MotoGP class never to become world champion. In 2003, he won the world title in the 125cc class, followed by titles in the 250cc class in 2004 and 2005.